Character building

Sandra Hall

Ruby Sparks, the heroine of this eccentric Los Angeles fable, is a modern-day Galatea who has been conjured up by her boyfriend's imagination.

He is a novelist who has been suffering writer's block since making his highly acclaimed literary debut at the age of 19. Every morning, he goes to his typewriter (he's an old-fashioned boy) and faces the terror of the blank page.

A novelist struggling with writer's block finds romance in a most unusual way: by creating a female character he thinks will love him, then willing her into existence.

Full synopsis

His shrink, Dr Rosenthal, can't help - probably because he's played by Elliott Gould, who has trouble taking the job seriously - but one day their therapy sessions produce an unexpectedly fruitful idea. Calvin, the novelist, has acquired his yappy little dog, Scotty, in the hope that Scotty will help him meet girls, yet it hasn't happened. But what if it had, Dr Rosenthal asks. What sort of girl might have taken to Scotty - and his owner?

This simple suggestion gets Calvin writing again. First the girl, whom he names Ruby, appears in his dreams. Then her flesh-and-blood form turns up in his kitchen, making breakfast. What's more, his friends and family can see her, too. After he recovers from his amazement, Calvin decides that he's in love. He is also seized with the desire to write a book about it.

Ruby actually sprang from the imagination of Zoe Kazan, a granddaughter of the director Elia Kazan and daughter of screenwriters Nicholas Kazan and Robin Swicord. I guess that makes her Hollywood aristocracy, although she lives in New York, successfully working as an actor and playwright. She takes on the role of Ruby and her live-in boyfriend, Paul Dano, is Calvin. An eternally boyish character with a look of scholarly concern, Dano is probably best remembered as the fanatical evangelist he played opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood. As Calvin, he is as earnest as ever and bespectacled - a word that suits him particularly well because his glasses are such an integral feature of his physiognomy.

Consequently, he looks mild-mannered but impressions are misleading for he finds that he enjoys being able to control the fey and girlish Ruby - something he does by typing a sentence or two. If he writes, ''Ruby speaks French'', that's exactly what she does.

Advertisement

The film's directors, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, brought us the wickedly funny Little Miss Sunshine, in which Dano also appeared. As a result, Little Miss Sunshine fans have been hoping they would see more in the same vein with this one. Not so. For the first half, the lovers are so blissfully in love that they do little more than giggle their way through a series of happy-time montages and the effect is boringly winsome. Occasionally, there's a change of pace thanks to the presence of Chris Messina as Calvin's cheerfully chauvinistic brother, Harry, and British comic Steve Coogan as Langdon Tharp, a rival novelist who is as snaky as he sounds. While failing to sympathise with Calvin over his writer's block, he says that J.D. Salinger had the right idea: ''Write what you can. Then disappear.''

You will now receive updates fromEntertainment Newsletter

Entertainment Newsletter

But the film doesn't really fire until Calvin takes Ruby to visit his widowed mother, Gertrude (Annette Bening in a curly wig), who has taken up New Ageism with her new man, Mort (an effervescent Antonio Banderas). They live in Big Sur in what looks like a giant tree-house and Mort spends his time making supremely uncomfortable wooden furniture. He and Gertrude are deliriously happy together - a fact that has Calvin behaving like Hamlet. Leaving Ruby to join in the fun, he retreats to the house's upper reaches to read a book, pausing occasionally to cast baleful looks on the revellers below.

And round about now, things start getting very serious, for Zoe Kazan's main purpose begins to come into view, and it's an ambitious one. Not only is she aiming to teach Calvin an indelible lesson about the perils of being a control freak, she's also fashioning an allegory about the writing of fiction. Her point is that true storytellers are the ones who allow their creations to breathe freely and assume lives of their own - lives dictated by their evolving characters rather than their creator's desire to use them to hammer home an argument.

And it's something well worth saying for it's a question that writers grapple with all the time. But in spelling it out, the script brings on such an abrupt change of mood that the film is thrown completely off-balance. There's one scene so macabre that it's as if rom-com has morphed into horror movie.

So it falls short - which makes it an especially frustrating experience. There's so much to like and so many potentially interesting ideas to embrace that I really wanted it to work. But Ruby and Calvin fail to give their see-sawing relationship the oomph it needs and, without that, the rest is irrelevant.